I thought I would share my excel workbooks with you guys. These are what I use to plan, log and track my UD2 cycles. Those of you that like delving into the numbers of this sort of thing and tweak values at this level will have a splendid time digging into them and learning how to use them effectively. Those of you who do not...will absolutely hate them and wonder why you would need to do this sort of thing. Well, I am a software systems developer so this is right up my alley and I literally can't think a compelling reason why you would NOT want to use a tool like this! LOL I hope you guys benefit as much as my wife and I have!

It consists of three separate workbooks...

Program Outline - This is where you look at where you currently are fitness-wise...where you want to go and how you plan to get there. It allows you to plan each week in detail from workouts to supplements. Set your UD2 values and track your caloric intake vs. workout expenditure...body composition through impedance monitoring (yeah, i know...garbage in garbage out...not the worst for tracking delta though)...use calipers if you like..i check it both ways just for kicks. It includes an analysis sheet that graphs your progress over time...a sheet to create your workouts and take your weekly measurements.

Workout Calculator - There are many phone / heart rate monitor apps that do the same thing, but I find it convenient to track it here via a CSV download from the HRM app...I use Motifit. I wrote the core of this one years ago and didn't want to just scrap it so i updated it to work for both men and women, to set zone values and the MHR calculation method. For those of you that attend Orange Theory Fitness (like my wife does) can use the OTF formula to set the zones and colors to their system. You can track steady state workouts, varying interval workouts (comparing different interval setups to find which one puts you in the zone you want to be in and for how long). Also analyzes actual HRM output data so you can literally do anything you like while wearing your HRM and the plug the numbers back into the program outline to track progress.

Meal Planner - This helps you plan and track meals to a very fine level of accuracy. First you enter in your foods from your pantry into the appropriate category on the food list sheet using the calculator (either as ingredients or fixed items) and then you can use them to create meals that conform to your UD2 goals. You enter your daily meal goals into the Meal Planner sheet and determine your UD2 carb load values by simply selecting which meals in the thursday/friday transition zone you want to include. You can create 'Low Carb', 'High Carb' and 'Maintenance Meals' for later use...just basically copy and paste from one sheet to another or you can create 'Menu Items' that contain multiple ingredients distilled down to the base macro-nutrient ratio and treat them just like any other food item.

There is some redundancy between the workbooks to allow you to generate the necessary UD2 values and then track them in other workbooks that also depend on those values...and then over time you can recheck your values and make whatever adjustments you need moving forward. My wife and I have used this for the past few weeks and it has been a great tool.

There are literally too many caveats in how these work to explain them in this post, but if you have any questions or find any bugs just post them here and I will do my best to answer in a timely manner.

I am constantly updating and improving these, but for now here are the links to my working copies so you can see what they look like in progress as the data is being filled in.

Workbooks Updated...found a few boogers here and there...added a few cross-workbook references so they can talk to each other a little bit instead of having to transfer values back and forth. Also removed the password on the worksheet protection, so those that are inclined can dig around in the details a bit further.

These are my working copies so you can see my progress thus far through the first 5.5 weeks. The analysis tab in the 'Program Outline' workbook really gives a good view of just how well things have tracked.

I am constantly modifying and updating the workbooks and they can be a bit of a handful as a result. I update them so often that it was a complete pain to try and throw them up here without a detailed explanation on the features and how they worked. Far too time consuming as it turns out.

There are multiple workbooks involved with links between them which can be hard to work with for novice excel users...and they can be extremely hard to manipulate without initial instruction. It is important that you understand and are comfortable with the logic used to design them so you can find your way around the endless inputs. Without this they can be difficult to manage.

Most individuals I have sent them to give up after a few days...they say it is too much detail for them to bother with...they want managing the program to be far easier. Taking into account how detailed you want to be I suppose "easy" is a relative term!

PM me if you would like the workbooks and I will do my best to make them available once I get them to a point where I am happy to let them loose.